Politics
‘0 to 1939 in 3 seconds’: Why Anti-Elon Musk Satire Is Flourishing in Britain
The mischievous posters began appearing all over London in the past two months.
On the side of an East London bus stop, one of them shows Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, emerging from a Tesla’s roof with his hand pointing upward in a straight-armed salute. “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds,” the ad reads. “Tesla. The Swasticar.”
Another mock ad shows Mr. Musk and President Trump in front of a red Tesla with the words: “Now With White Power Steering.” In North London, a fake movie billboard blares: “The Fast and the Führer,” with a picture of Mr. Musk saluting beside a Tesla with a DOGE license plate, a reference to the budget-slashing federal agency he currently leads on behalf of Mr. Trump.
“Parental Guidance,” warns the billboard, put up by a group calling itself Overthrow Musk. “Tesla’s CEO is a far-right activist. Don’t give him your money.”
Across the British capital and in several European cities, Mr. Musk’s signature business has become the target of the same kind of political anger that has fueled vandalism of Tesla cars in the United States and sometimes violent protests at his dealerships.
There have been some instances of unruly protests and vandalism in Europe. But much of the anti-Musk sentiment has taken the form of political satire, of the kind that has flourished in Britain since at least the 18th century.
Just outside Berlin, a group called the Center for Political Beauty used high-power lights to project the word “Heil” onto the side of a Tesla factory so that it read “Heil Tesla,” along with a picture of Mr. Musk saluting during a speech in Washington. In Italy, street art depicts Elon Musk taking off a mask to show Adolf Hitler’s face underneath. The words “Elon Mask” appear above the picture.
“There’s never been a target exactly like this,” said John Gorenfeld, a software engineer who helped start a London-based group called “Takedown Tesla.” The group has organized protests of several dozen people for the past several weeks. They hold posters along freeways that say “Honk if you hate Elon.” And they have printed bumper stickers for Tesla owners with phrases like “Don’t make the same mistake” and “Pre-2020 Model.”
“Nobody who is that rich and powerful has behaved that outrageously,” Mr. Gorenfeld said. “There’s something campy and ridiculous about Musk’s brand of toxicity. And it opens up a real space to ridicule.”
In Europe, Mr. Musk is not just a faraway example of American wealth and power. Over the last year, he has become a frequent political meddler, often weighing in on behalf of far-right causes on X, his social media platform, where he has 218 million followers.
In Britain, Mr. Musk is known for sharing misinformation about a child rape scandal and calling for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to be jailed. He has called for the release of Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-immigrant agitator who is in prison for contempt of court. And he criticized the seven-year sentence of a neo-Nazi who incited and took part in anti-immigrant riots last summer.
The small anti-Musk groups that have popped up around Europe have the same basic goal: Tank Tesla’s stock price and sales as a way of sending a message to Mr. Musk and other super-wealthy people who are thinking of promoting far-right politics around the world. Some groups declined to be interviewed about their actions, citing concern about becoming a target of Mr. Musk’s ire on social media. But others were more open about their aims.
“The point of this is to show Musk and other billionaires that they are vulnerable and can’t act with impunity,” said Ben Stewart, a founder of a British satirical activist group called Led by Donkeys, which worked with the Center for Political Beauty to project Mr. Musk’s image on the Berlin factory. “We have to harness global public opinion to push back.”
Organizers think it’s working. Tesla’s stock price has almost halved since its high in December, around the same time that Mr. Musk began his high-profile role overseeing the firing of government workers and slashing federal agency budgets. This week, Tesla reported a 13 percent drop in sales compared with a year ago.
“What they’re trying to do is put massive pressure on me, and Tesla I guess, to you know, I don’t know, stop doing this,” Mr. Musk said last week in Wisconsin where he was campaigning for a state supreme court candidate.
And yet, he added with a shrug, “Long term, I think Tesla stock’s going to do fine, so maybe it’s a buying opportunity.”
The protesters who spoke about their aims said they wanted to challenge Mr. Musk’s influence without resorting to the vandalism that the billionaire has called out in the United States as “coordinated violence against a peaceful company.”
Theodora Sutcliffe, a London resident who helped organize Tesla Takedown, said none of the people she works with are participating in violence. Instead, they have sought to find other ways to capture public attention.
At one of their protests, a wavy, 20-foot balloon man who vaguely resembled Mr. Musk saluted into the air. At other times, Ms. Sutcliffe and her fellow protesters have left fliers on the windshields of Tesla cars.
“Once upon a time, Teslas were cool,” one flier says. “Now, sadly, that’s not the case. Driving a Tesla and using Tesla chargers means you’re propping up Elon Musk, a man who promotes climate deniers and fossil-fuel junkies.”
“If you want to go viral in the U.K., you have to be smart, I think,” Ms. Sutcliffe said. “That’s our sense of humor normally.”
The anti-Musk efforts in Berlin were led by Philipp Ruch, the artistic director for the Center for Political Beauty, a German activist group. In an interview, he said that much of the anger at Mr. Musk in Germany stems from the billionaire’s support for the country’s far-right party, the Alternative for Germany.
“The first day that the administration comes in, he does the Hitler salute,” Mr. Ruch said. “This is something we couldn’t tolerate, politically and artistically.”
Mr. Ruch performs many of his protests by “overwriting” one image with another. At the Tesla dealership, he used lights to superimpose his words and images of Mr. Musk to create a new artistic creation. (He said the police are now investigating his efforts, which were visible for about an hour.) Pictures of the building were spread widely on social media.
Other efforts have gone viral, too.
There are mock car air fresheners called “Musk-B-Gone” that promise to cover “the stench of fascism.” And cardboard cutouts of Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump, thanking Tesla owners for their support when they top up their cars at the company’s supercharger lots.
“There are some people who are coming at Musk as though he’s some sort of passive agent of Trump and that really, this is just another way of getting to Trump,” said Ms. Sutcliffe. “There’s other people who perceive Musk as somebody who’s a unique type of threat that we really haven’t seen before in terms of his economic control and control of the information space.”
Politics
Trump signs order to protect Venezuela oil revenue held in US accounts
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President Donald Trump has signed an executive order blocking U.S. courts from seizing Venezuelan oil revenues held in American Treasury accounts.
The order states that court action against the funds would undermine U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.
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President Donald Trump is pictured signing two executive orders on Sept. 19, 2025, establishing the “Trump Gold Card” and introducing a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas. He signed another executive order recently protecting oil revenue. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Trump signed the order on Friday, the same day that he met with nearly two dozen top oil and gas executives at the White House.
The president said American energy companies will invest $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s “rotting” oil infrastructure and push production to record levels following the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
The U.S. has moved aggressively to take control of Venezuela’s oil future following the collapse of the Maduro regime.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Politics
Column: Some leaders will do anything to cling to positions of power
One of the most important political stories in American history — one that is particularly germane to our current, tumultuous time — unfolded in Los Angeles some 65 years ago.
Sen. John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, had just received his party’s nomination for president and in turn he shunned the desires of his most liberal supporters by choosing a conservative out of Texas as his running mate. He did so in large part to address concerns that his faith would somehow usurp his oath to uphold the Constitution. The last time the Democrats nominated a Catholic — New York Gov. Al Smith in 1928 — he lost in a landslide, so folks were more than a little jittery about Kennedy’s chances.
“I am fully aware of the fact that the Democratic Party, by nominating someone of my faith, has taken on what many regard as a new and hazardous risk,” Kennedy told the crowd at the Memorial Coliseum. “But I look at it this way: The Democratic Party has once again placed its confidence in the American people, and in their ability to render a free, fair judgment.”
The most important part of the story is what happened before Kennedy gave that acceptance speech.
While his faith made party leaders nervous, they were downright afraid of the impact a civil rights protest during the Democratic National Convention could have on November’s election. This was 1960. The year began with Black college students challenging segregation with lunch counter sit-ins across the Deep South, and by spring the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had formed. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not the organizer of the protest at the convention, but he planned to be there, guaranteeing media attention. To try to prevent this whole scene, the most powerful Black man in Congress was sent to stop him.
The Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was also a warrior for civil rights, but the House representative preferred the legislative approach, where backroom deals were quietly made and his power most concentrated. He and King wanted the same things for Black people. But Powell — who was first elected to Congress in 1944, the same year King enrolled at Morehouse College at the age of 15 — was threatened by the younger man’s growing influence. He was also concerned that his inability to stop the protest at the convention would harm his chance to become chairman of a House committee.
And so Powell — the son of a preacher, and himself a Baptist preacher in Harlem — told King that if he didn’t cancel, Powell would tell journalists a lie that King was having a homosexual affair with his mentor, Bayard Rustin. King stuck to his plan and led a protest — even though such a rumor would not only have harmed King, but also would have undermined the credibility of the entire civil rights movement. Remember, this was 1960. Before the March on Washington, before passage of the Voting Rights Act, before the dismantling of the very Jim Crow laws Powell had vowed to dismantle when first running for office.
That threat, my friends, is the most important part of the story.
It’s not that Powell didn’t want the best for the country. It’s just that he wanted to be seen as the one doing it and was willing to derail the good stemming from the civil rights movement to secure his own place in power. There have always been people willing to make such trade-offs. Sometimes they dress up their intentions with scriptures to make it more palatable; other times they play on our darkest fears. They do not care how many people get hurt in the process, even if it’s the same people they profess to care for.
That was true in Los Angeles in 1960.
That was true in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
That is true in the streets of America today.
Whether we are talking about an older pastor who is threatened by the growing influence of a younger voice or a president clinging to office after losing an election: To remain king, some men are willing to burn the entire kingdom down.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
Politics
Federal judge blocks Trump from cutting childcare funds to Democratic states over fraud concerns
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A federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stopping subsidies on childcare programs in five states, including Minnesota, amid allegations of fraud.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, a Biden appointee, didn’t rule on the legality of the funding freeze, but said the states had met the legal threshold to maintain the “status quo” on funding for at least two weeks while arguments continue.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns.
The programs include the Child Care and Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and the Social Services Block Grant, all of which help needy families.
USDA IMMEDIATELY SUSPENDS ALL FEDERAL FUNDING TO MINNESOTA AMID FRAUD INVESTIGATION
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
“Families who rely on childcare and family assistance programs deserve confidence that these resources are used lawfully and for their intended purpose,” HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said in a statement on Tuesday.
The states, which include California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, argued in court filings that the federal government didn’t have the legal right to end the funds and that the new policy is creating “operational chaos” in the states.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian at his nomination hearing in 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In total, the states said they receive more than $10 billion in federal funding for the programs.
HHS said it had “reason to believe” that the programs were offering funds to people in the country illegally.
‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’: SENATE REPUBLICANS PRESS GOV WALZ OVER MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
The table above shows the five states and their social safety net funding for various programs which are being withheld by the Trump administration over allegations of fraud. (AP Digital Embed)
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.” (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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Fox News Digital has reached out to HHS for comment.
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